Caretech Solutions

“Dynatrace shows exactly how our applications function from deep within the infrastructure right out to the end-user. It immediately changed our perspective on what we do.”

Jim Hunter,
Director of Security and Monitoring

Company: CareTech
Industry: Healthcare IT

Intro

CareTech Solutions is an information technology (IT), web products and services provider for hospitals and health systems. The company supports high operational efficiency and the best possible patient experience for its clients with more than 1,400 professionals in 38 states.

CareTech offers customized IT solutions that contribute to improve the patient experience while lowering healthcare costs. From implementing emerging technologies to supporting day-to-day IT operations, CareTech offers industry-leading health information technology services that help hospitals simplify and manage complex IT initiatives, while maximizing their investment.

“We offer traditional IT services and data center hosting,” explains Jim Hunter, Director of Security and Monitoring at CareTech. “I work with a team of about 200 technical professionals in my group. We have a clinical services desk, which really sets us apart in the market,” says Hunter. “It’s much more than just a traditional service desk or help desk. We do a lot of advanced level one or two support for clinicians when they call in.”

Challenge

Medical professionals must have quick and constant access to critical information—such as individual health records. If they don’t, there’s a major impact on service. It can also be a patient safety issue. Emergency rooms are stressful enough. System outages and downtime can make the experience even worse.

Right now the healthcare industry is under increasing pressure from the government to implement and develop electronic medical records systems. CareTech provides updated services and technology in this area for their clients. The company also provides monitoring for optimum system availability and performance.

“The clinicians themselves will tell you that their systems need to perform at their peak at all times. Seconds count in terms of their end-user experience. CareTech has built a service line around that,’” Hunter says. "It’s our own monitoring solution that we use together with application performance management (APM) to track performance for our clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We’re there to provide an advanced warning to make sure that downtime doesn’t happen. Our clients and their patients depend on us.”

“The clinicians themselves will tell you that their systems need to perform at their peak at all times. Seconds count in terms of their end-user experience.”

Solution

CareTech depends on Dynatrace to keep its clients’ systems running. “Our vision is to stop issues before anyone has to make a call to the service desk,” explains Hunter.

“We searched for a solution that would not just skim the surface of what’s going on. We needed something that could do a deep technical dive. Our developers created our applications. They know them inside and out, but they didn’t necessarily know the details of how they performed in real-world environments. Dynatrace was brought in to help solve the problem. We did a proof of concept (POC),” says Hunter. “We all met in the conference room. I was there, along with all forty of our developers and some additional people on the infrastructure side to see what Dynatrace had to offer. It was one of those moments where nobody even paused to look at his or her laptop or phone,” he continues.

“Everybody was looking at the screen. For the first time we could all see the impact of our products in a real working environment. Dynatrace showed exactly how our applications function from deep within the infrastructure right out to the end-user. It immediately changed our perspective on what we do. Now we use Dynatrace to help us deliver exactly what our clients want—very quickly.”

“We searched for a solution that would not just skim the surface of what’s going on. We needed something that could do a deep technical dive.”

Benefits

“Once we implemented Dynatrace, the infrastructure spend for CareTech noticeably dropped in terms of the requests that we had for new servers,” Hunter says. “New infrastructure to support web hosting went down significantly. Now we could extend the life of the infrastructure that was put in place to host the clients. This had an immediate impact on our capital expenditures—and, as a result, our bottom line.”

“Before Dynatrace we had typical battles between developers and infrastructure. When performance issues would come up, developers would immediately look to the infrastructure side for more resources. We, in turn, would say that with more resources, there will be more issues.”

“Dynatrace became the referee that we brought in to settle issues empirically rather than emotionally. It transformed how we worked from finding fault to solving problems.”

Hunter elaborates: “We create synthetic transactions that we call ‘robots.’ These robots are really virtual users to us. We explain to our clients that we’re going to put them right in the areas where clinicians would work to make sure that end-user experience is as fast and smooth as possible. The robots give us a proactive edge we need to support healthcare professionals all the time.”

“The most important recommendation I offer anyone considering an APM solution is to bring it in and try it. I’m the biggest skeptic out there,” he says. “I believe it when I see it. The team from Dynatrace showed us exactly what it can do. It was proof positive. We had a room full of people that were ready to use it that day.”

“Dynatrace became the referee that we brought in to settle issues empirically rather than emotionally. It transformed how we worked from finding fault to solving problems.”